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Phonogram (linguistics)

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by RevStarchildren (talk | contribs) at 16:32, 1 February 2015 (Replaced the word phonics' with the word 'phonemes'. Phonics is the relationship between phonemes and phonograms/graphemes.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

A phonogram is a grapheme (written character) which represents a phoneme (speech sound) or combination of phonemes, such as the letters of the Latin alphabet or the Japanese kana. For example, "igh" is an English-language phonogram that represents the hard "I" sound in "high". Whereas the word phonemes refers to the sounds, the word phonogram refers to the letter(s) that represent that sound.

Phonograms contrast with logograms, which represent words and morphemes (meaningful units of language), and determinatives, silent characters used to mark semantic categories.